As I write this popular mayoral incumbent is a write-in candidate paid for by the grateful financiers of the last 8 years.  In the 1993 David Dinkins was out of town when the World Trade Center was bombed, but by responding to the "greatest crisis in new york city", Giuliani has been popularized and his policies reified through an more determined, ever-present NYPD.   

Revanchinism is the little brother of globalized neoliberalism.  Smith's unscrupulous criticism comes with a call to political action.  His condemnation is that in a lofty but modest-sounding municipal policy to "reclaim public space" (which is the same slogan used by a local activist group numbered on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list) in the modern metropolis, its avengers are not necessarily nor will they ever be the same people who genuinely occupy that space; by living, eating and sleeping in it.  In practice, all the power accumulations policized as philanthropic garve removal, the image of the New City associated itself with Disney-fication of the pornography district, the downsizing of the city's young in an uncontrolled premature  evacuation of funds, and the masses of homeless ghettos thrown into the gas chamber of the city prison bueracracy where they were never to be seen before in the eyes of respectable white middle class citizens, contributors to the welfare of our streets.  Giuliani has been called a racist, fascist dictator as many times as neoliberalim has been heralded as our most benevolent solution.  That the grim economic analysis follows closely with the criticism of power and state exhumes a certain radical intellectual tradition sung by Marx and Bakunin.  A marxist-anarchist debate at one point tackled each other in the question of what drew power from the masses the most - its money or its lives, which were both rapidly being controlled by a new emerging form of economics which asked, politely and with gold teeth, to sit beside the throne of the state.